For some in Lac-Mégantic, anniversary is too much to bear

‘I have a life to live. I don’t want to bring all this up again. I have to continue to try to live.’

Visitors look use a new boardwalks to look out at the former downtown core of Lac-Mégantic.

Photograph by: Allen McInnis
, Montreal Gazette

LAC-MÉGANTIC — At a dépanneur on the corner of Lac-Mégantic’s Laval St., customers walk past a rack of newspapers with a mix of all-too-familiar scenes laid out across their front pages: pictures of last summer’s rail disaster and more recent ones of the town’s rebuilding process.

For a town at a crossroads between trying to forget and choosing to remember, this weekend’s one-year anniversary is a reminder that forgetting might never be a possibility at all, and the only option left may be moving forward without pausing to look back too often.

“Have a nice weekend,” one customer says to the store clerk on her way out. “Or at least try to have as nice a weekend as possible.”

Sunday at 1 a.m. will be 365 days since the deadly train derailment that killed 47 people, and the town has planned events to take place at that very moment: a comforting mass, a candle-lit walk, concerts and vigils.

Some are seeing the ceremonies as a large-scale support group of sorts, an assurance that those who lost so much one year ago won’t find themselves alone again, at least not for this night.

“Some people really need this, they need to be around other people who can share their grief,” said 63-year-old Lac-Mégantic native Guy Bouffard, standing atop Laval St. and looking down towards the construction-riddled area where ceremonies are scheduled.

Like so many in the town, Bouffard knew people who were among those killed in the blast that night, but he counts himself lucky to not have lost any family members.

“I know a lot of parents who lost their children, and I know they don’t want to be alone for this,” he said.

What he is struggling with most one year later is finding that sense of comfort and safety that always made him proud of being from Lac-Mégantic.

“You like to think that when you go to sleep in your bed at night you’re safe,” he said before pausing. “But we all found out that night that we’re not, and that feeling hasn’t gone away yet.”

For as many people he knows that are welcoming Saturday night’s events, Bouffard also knows others who wish it wasn’t happening in the first place.

Some people have made great progress with their grieving since that day, he explained, and to have it all brought back this weekend could be a big step backwards for them.

Maurice Roy, 66, was born here and now lives in Ste-Cécile-de-Milton, near Granby.

Before last year’s tragedy and ever since, he’s spent the majority of his weekends in Lac-Mégantic, where he meets up with old friends and revisits childhood memories — two things that are increasingly hard to do.

The downtown sidewalk where a youthful bike accident left a lifelong scar across his knee is gone, as are the three friends he lost that night, one of whom he worked with the day before the accident, and another who was his neighbor in Ste-Cécile.

As the town plans commemorative ceremonies, Roy plans on avoiding the town for the first weekend in a long time.

“It’s a little too sensitive for me,” he said. “I have a life to live. I don’t want to bring all this up again. I have to continue to try to live.”

Three weeks following the accident he found out about a third friend who died that night.

“I was in such a daze when everything happened, I hadn’t noticed him in the papers,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Though he usually goes to sleep around 8 o’clock each night, Roy plans on waking up at midnight Saturday to pray for a few hours on his own — away from the group prayers planned for downtown.

He would rather do it this way, he says, and “let the people who were really hit hard have their space.”

“It’s getting better after a year,” he said, “but this weekend would be a little too much for me.”

A local waitress who asked to remain anonymous agreed with Roy, speaking passionately about the weekend.

“It’s just too big, it’s like sticking a knife in the wound and twisting it,” she said.

“No one wants to live through it again,” she said, adding how she thinks a large majority of the town will be leaving Lac-Mégantic for the weekend. “It already hurts enough, people need to be allowed to mourn and grieve at their own pace.”

Many are viewing the weekend’s ceremonies as a way to keep those who died in mind and not let the tragedy become part of the town’s past just yet. In addition to a wall etched with all of the victims’ names at the new Centre Sportif Mégantic, a separate monument will also be added in front of Ste-Agnès church Sunday morning.

“We already have reminders all around,” said Lorriane Poirier, sitting on her balcony just across the street from the town’s Red Zone and gesturing towards the downtown area.

Poirier could never see the lake from her balcony, she explained. For her, the clear view she now has of it is a reminder each morning that the familiar buildings of downtown are no longer.

“I watched them crumble like a house of cards, that’s the image that keeps playing in my mind,” she said, breaking into tears.

Poirier still doesn’t know if she’ll stay inside her apartment or wander across the street when the ceremonies begin on Saturday night. Sometimes it feels good to talk to people, other times she prefers being alone.

Walking the quiet streets of the town you get the sense that’s how many people here are feeling towards the weekend, unsure what to expect or how they’ll react when they’re forced to stop and think one more time of what happened last summer.

As the town tries to stay together and cope with the tragedy, this weekend’s ceremonies are proving to be a divisive topic.

“Even after a year, everyone is still an individual case,” said Bouffard. “You can never expect two people to go through this kind of tragedy the same way.”

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